21 Hats Podcast

This week, Gene Marks tells us he’s found the next killer app for small business, and it’s not something that’s theoretical and might be ready sometime next year. It’s ready now, and it’s Google’s NotebookLM. Gene had reviewed it previously and found it wanting but took another look at the latest version and found it could do things like streamline a job search and spot anomalies in his financials. But Gene also offers a caveat for rolling out any AI app or even a CRM: if you don’t configure it right, you can run into some very big problems. Plus: he also discusses the latest in password technology.

This week, in episode 222, we bring you another Entrepreneurial Fish Bowl with Chris Hutchinson. These Fish Bowls are our virtual brainstorming sessions where we offer business owners the opportunity to pose a challenge they’re facing to a group of owners and entrepreneurs from the 21 Hats community. This time, our volunteers are Alvin Elbert, founder of A.R.E. Manufacturing, and his daughter Megan Perona, who explain that their company had its best year ever in 2022 but has seen business fall off since then. For 40 years, A.R.E. grew slowly but steadily on word of mouth. More recently, however, the Elbert family has concluded that it’s time to do some real marketing. Like a lot of owners, though, they’re a little overwhelmed by the options, unsure where to begin, and wary of wasting money. They also happen to be going through a family ownership transition. The 21 Hats brainstormers begin by asking a lot of questions, including whether the owners have invested in search engine optimization, whether they’ve gone back to some of the customers they lost to China, and whether they’ve considered hiring a marketing agency.

This week, Victor Hwang shares some surprising reasons to be optimistic about entrepreneurship in America. For one thing, Victor, who is founder of Right To Start, an advocacy group, says that he can’t remember a presidential election where entrepreneurship was as much a part of the conversation as it was in this one. For another, he points to a series of policy changes at the local level that have made it far easier to start businesses and that he believes will serve as a blueprint for other jurisdictions looking to cut red tape. As always, Victor brings news that has yet to reach most of us—including an issue he plans to address in 2025: standard lending rules that actually discriminate against entrepreneurs by making it harder for them to get a home mortgage.

In 2021, Mel Gravely wrote a book, Dear White Friend, that was aimed primarily at fellow business owners. In the book, Mel tried to make it easier for owners to have genuine conversations about race. He suggested strategies for those, perhaps motivated by the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, who might want to engage. He acknowledged that emphasizing diversity can be hard work. He acknowledged that some of his own efforts had failed. But he also pointed out that he himself had been, in his words, “an affirmative action baby” and that that investment had paid off for his college, his previous employers, and the city of Cincinnati. It’s been less than four years since Mel published Dear White Friend, but of course that was a very different time. This week, he talks about the backlash that has ensued and the strategies he still believes can work for those who don’t consider diversity a dirty word.

This week, Gene Marks tells us that the first really meaningful AI applications aimed at smaller businesses will arrive in the coming months. Gene does offer some caveats, including his mantra: “Never buy the first version of anything from Microsoft.” But he also offers some tantalizing examples of things AI agents will do for business owners in the very near future, like qualifying sales leads and then putting a sales rep through a role-playing exercise to prepare for a specific client. What should owners do now to prepare? “Beat up your vendors,” says Gene. “And clean up your data.”

This week, in episode 220, Paul Downs and Jay Goltz talk about the risks they didn’t see coming. While everyone knows there’s a risk that a business can fail because it just doesn’t work, there are lots of other, less obvious risks. These are not the risks you lose sleep over, but they’re real, and if you don’t manage them, you can expose yourself needlessly to a slew of problems. Because most people learn about these risks the hard way, Jay and Paul set out to create a top 10 list of them, but I think—for those of you keeping score at home—we actually hit 11. Which led Jay to caution: “I by no means am telling anybody, ‘Oh my God, I don't sleep at night. I'm worried about all these things.’ I'm not worried about them. I just keep an eye on them.” Wait, says Paul. That’s another one: “The risk is that you let this thing live in your head and that it destroys your ability to focus on what you should focus on.” Okay, so that makes 12. And by all means, please let us know which ones we missed.

This week, Gene Marks offers some timely tips on ways you can reduce your tax burden. As you probably know, it’s a good time to consider buying an electric vehicle or some capital equipment. But Gene also offers some less obvious suggestions. For example, if you’re looking to increase your employee compensation, there can be tax advantages to paying more of their health insurance coverage rather than giving them a raise. Also, if you own the business with a spouse, Gene explains how you might benefit from reallocating how you distribute the earnings. And of course, pay those estimated taxes on time.

This week, in episode 219, special guest Travis LeFever shares the unusual journey he and his co-founder wife, Amanda, have taken to build Mission Mobile Medical, which makes mobile health clinics in Greensboro, NC. That journey started with Travis partnering in a construction business by taking out 39 credit cards to borrow $250,000. The business did well, and he eventually bought out his partner, but when Travis’ father died unexpectedly, he was moved to sell the construction business and look for something more meaningful to do with his life. That extended search led him, somewhat improbably, to overseeing sales for a company that manufactured specialty vehicles, including the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. It was there that Travis had another life-changing experience when a nurse with a federal grant asked if he could build a mobile clinic to reach patients in underserved communities. That was the spark that led Travis and Amanda to cash in their insurance policies and start Mission Mobile Medical in 2020. The company, whose remanufacturing process allows it to create clinics in less time and for less money than its competitors, expects to hit $60 million in revenue this year.

This week, Shawn Busse talks about something that everyone kind of knows but too few businesses emphasize: remarkable things can happen when businesses improve their workplace culture and let the world know about it. Shawn shares his approach to building a brand as an employer and explains why the payoff can easily be hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This week, in episode 218, special guest Rich Jordan tells Shawn Busse and Jay Goltz what it was like buying a small plumbing business in 2020 despite having very little experience with either plumbing or business—but having spent 10 years in the Marine Corps. “When I reflected on my time in service and what I did well and what I enjoyed,” Rich tells us, “it was when I was on a small team with high stakes, far forward, far from the flagpole, responsible for making decisions and sustaining ourselves and figuring things out. So when I thought about that—small team, high stakes, self-sustained—small business kind of fit that bill.” Not surprisingly, it took Rich some time to figure out what he was doing with the plumbing business, but in just four years, through organic growth and a few acquisitions—while taking no outside capital—he’s gone from three plumbers and $1 million in annual revenue to about 90 employees and $20 million in revenue. Which is why, Rich tells Jay and Shawn, he keeps moving the goalposts, reassessing just how big he wants the business to be.